Category Archives: essays

Mirrors, carried down roads

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I’m happy to report that I have a new essay up at Open Letters Monthly. It’s called “My Disappearance” and it’s about teaching creative writing, David Foster Wallace, the idea of mentors, being turned into a fictional character, and John Barth. And so much more!

Well, not really: that’s actually what it’s about, but you know, spooled out into many more words and riveting anecdotes. Anyway, please go check it out. I can’t think of any pithy, meta angle to take on this piece; it’s already fairly meta as it is.

Okay, I lied: here are two meta-bits. In the essay, there’s some stuff about funhouse mirrors, à la Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and this has gotten me thinking about weird mirror effects. I’ve only taken a few selfies thus far in my life, which probably tells you more about my age and disposition than I care to admit, but one of them was in an elevator, alone, just as the doors closed. It was one of those elevators whose door interior was all reflective, and I had two competing reflections of myself sliding toward each other on each half, except that when they met and sealed me in, my head disappeared. The rest of my wide body reflected, but my noggin was erased. And that’s the photo I got. I’m not sure where that photo is at the moment, or I would post it. It’s lost somewhere in the ever-expanding junk drawer of digital documentation. Someone should become the Marie Kondo of data storage.

Second, Graceland. Everyone should visit Graceland, not just because Elvis lived there but because the combination of irony and sentiment and kitsch whirs together into something that ends up feeling like pathos. But one of the many great moments in Graceland, when you take the tour, is when you walk down the stairs into Elvis’s basement. The walls and the ceiling of the stairwell are completely covered in mirrors, and the panoramic reflection of yourself and the rest of the tourists is overwhelming. If there is a heaven, Elvis is there, giggling.

Coincidental Religion

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I originally wrote this over on Medium a while back, but for reasons too boring and idiosyncratic to go into, I wanted to post it here as well.

Last spring I finished Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel that imagines the unfolding of the JFK assassination. I read it in disjointed chunks, covering the first half over a couple of months, the second half in one huge gulp. Consequently, the emotion it contains was held somewhat at arm’s length, as if I were growing myopic while reading.

But then, the following Thursday, I came home and followed the police chase of the Tsarnaev brothers in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I followed the mayhem — this incident seems actually to earn the word — via Twitter: journalists on the ground, galloping after Cambridge sirens like hounds; police scanner DJs, EQing the static; and the real-time TV critics, embroidering (and eviscerating) the ongoing cable news coverage.

I’ve often thought that Twitter is the ultimate Modernist novel: an ungraspable fragmented mound of human utterance, revealing the consciousness of a culture in the crevices between tweets. And here, during this unfolding terrorist incident, was one of Twitter’s “best” moments, at least in terms of generating (spontaneously, collectively) a real-time Modernist thriller. The event was large enough on a national news-crisis level to magnetize and collate the million shards that is Twitter.

All of this unfolding meta-reality added a ghostly echo to finishing Libra. One of the key formal distinctions of the novel is the way that it unfolds in two simultaneous time frames: the slow accrual of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the much-faster unfolding of the plot to assassinate the president, orchestrated by former CIA operatives, disgruntled after the blundered Bay of Pigs. It’s a weird narrative tango for the first hundred pages or so, but you eventually adjust to the rhythm and by the end of the novel, you see what DeLillo is up to: how Oswald is both the agent of his own destiny and simultaneously a cog within a vast plot machinery, how the JFK assassination is an uncanny collaboration between circumstance and the will of various individuals.

And that is what the Boston Marathon and its thrilling boat-in-the-backyard finish felt like — a story of personal grievance that fits within the larger Narrative that None of Us Control.

It’s a cliche at this point to say that DeLillo has predicted what life feels like now. I haven’t read enough of him to argue about this sufficiently. However, I can say that DeLillo is a master of the List: the agglutination of seemingly disconnected, often repetitive detail. Here’s an example from the consciousness of Win Everett, a former CIA analyst forced into pseudo-retirement after the Bay of Pigs and one of the principal architects of the assassination. Here he’s imagining creating someone like Oswald:

An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of a deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.

What’s fascinating, on a simply novelistic construction level, is how dense the novel feels, how fortified it is with matter, both “real” and invented. One reads the novel with a growing admiration not just for DeLillo’s vision in tackling the material but simply his relentless diligence with the detail.

There’s also a novelist figure within the novel itself — Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who has been tasked (again here the weird verbed word seems earned) with writing a history of the assassination. He sits in his home office, under daily assault of data sent by the Curator:

Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can discard as irrelevant or out-of-date. It all matters on one level or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.

I bought Libra last January during a trip to Boston. It was one of those rare brief spans of time where I was unencumbered by work or children or the little horizonal clouds of impending obligation, just a free afternoon in a strange city covered in snow, walking until my feet got sore, ducking into shops for warmth.

When the bombings occurred, their location made immediate sense. My winter walking had unknowingly encircled the blast site. One floats into coincidence, both historical and trivial, like a kid swimming in a river, as unseen pockets of coldness envelop your legs briefly and then drift away.

There were too many ironies and coincidences. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million. Yes yes yes yes.

Relevant tweets picked up speed when Boston police released the suspects’ photos after 5 p.m. ET on April 18. A time zone and several states away, I began following the tweets intently via my phone, on the way home from work, while letting the dog out to pee, while prepping my children for bed. After dinner, I checked back in, and there had been a mysterious shooting of an MIT police officer. I followed the tweets for the next few hours, giving up shortly after midnight and the climactic Watertown shootout.

Various journalists get re-tweeted from the scene and are subsequently followed, like Seth Mnookin. What gets reported is ad hoc, invaluable, flawed, riveting. You can feel the exponential unknowability of the moment, the JFK-ification of historical record.

Was it three shots or four? Was there one shooter or two? Did Oswald act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy? The answer to each is both. And (so it seems) it will always be both, the gears grinding against one another, the friction of data generating narrative heat. A definitive event occurred, but we will never be able to define it, and the more information we accumulate about it, the more unknowable it becomes. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is this way.

He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.

When people discuss — I admit few people discuss this — the future of the novel and what comes next after post-modernism (itself a highly dubious term), I think: there will be no next step; the authorship and reading of such a novel has collapsed into the same individual. We are all Nicholas Branch now, all connected to some Curator who is constantly sending us more data to process, and we are all fashioning our own disparate and repetitive novel from the data of the day. Sometimes these factoids magnetize around an event, and sometimes it’s just the ongoing flow — endless and contradictory, collected and composed by us, individually and collectively, simultaneously, every day. Each day we renew the personal conspiracy theory that is our own Twitter stream.

Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight.

Crack that whip

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I’ve got a new essay out in the world. “Portrait of Bullwhip” was published yesterday over at BULL Men’s Fiction. Yes, I realize that the essay is actually not fiction, but there is more to BULL than meets the eye.

Anyway, the essay is about Indiana Jones, and bullwhips, and trying to be manly. Well, sort of.

In addition, BULL has conducted one of their one-question interviews with me, which you can read here.

My Life as a Mannequin

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Dear friendly people of the Internet,

Are we still capitalizing “Internet”? I refuse to hyphenate “email” and feel increasingly gooby capitalizing “Web.” Surely all linguistic acceptance leads toward lowercase.

Anyway, I have a new essay out in the world. It’s called “My Life as a Mannequin” and it’s about Philip Roth, getting lost, Washington, D.C., good bookstores, and more Philip Roth. It’s in the latest issue of Open Letters Monthly.

I originally read part of this essay at the Roth@80 Conference in Newark, NJ, this past spring, an event that was put on by the Philip Roth Society in honor of Roth’s 80th birthday. You can read more about the extravaganza in this New York Times’ article.

Do I feel smug linking to a New York Times’ article? Yes, I do.

Anyway, this essay wouldn’t have made it out of the gate if it weren’t for Roth scholar extraordinare and friend and all around badass David Gooblar. If you want to know more about Roth, you should read his book, The Major Phases of Philip Roth.

p.s. For the extra diligent, here is David Remnick’s recap in the New Yorker of the same Roth event.

p.p.s. The essay in Open Letters features perhaps my second favorite Roth photo of all time. My first favorite is the Hot Dog Photo, which I can’t find in my preliminary internet searching (little “i”), but which was definitely included in the recent photo exhibit in the Newark Public Library.

All the Rage

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Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
Geoff Dyer
Picador, 2009

Dyer and his brand of blurrily personal nonfiction is much in the ether lately, or at least the certain subsection of slightly literary inclined internet ether I breath, for better and worse. But more than the chatter overhead, Dyer has been urged on me by a well-read, much-respected friend, and I have finally buckled against my own inability to take reading suggestions and have read Out of Sheer Rage, his book charting his failure to write a sober, academic study of Lawrence.

I thought the book was almost an undiluted joy. Like much of Nicholson Baker’s writing, the book sounds unendurable when subjected to brief description: it’s a book which chronicles the author’s inability to sit still and write about D.H. Lawrence, a writer he both admires and who has penetrated his life to a cellular level. But also like Baker’s U & I, the book manages both to avoid its way into its subject, to be both about the author’s own interests, obsessions, tics, neuroses, while also being about Lawrence, and teaching me–a Lawrence neophyte–a great deal and making me want to read Lawrence desperately.

It also makes me want to read more Dyer. I’m not sure if Dyer’s brand of nonfiction–novelistically pliable and complex and yet learned without being fusty, essayistic without mooning into abstraction, curling into scholarship, or shedding its style into reportage–is indeed the Next Wave, but he is one of those author’s who, as I think Martin Amis said somewhere, you discover with muffled enthusiasm, realizing as you read that you’re now going to have go read everything the man has written.

But I do have a quibble. And for better and worse, quibbles are easier to write about than straight praise: I wished the book had a bit more novelistic furniture, especially toward the end. When discussing Milan Kundera in the middle of the book (pgs. 118-122 in my paperback, where he mounts his quiet assault on the novel), Dyer says, “After reading Immortality what I wanted from Kundera was a novel composed entirely of essays, stripped of the last rind of novelization.” And while I find this idea fascinating and while what I liked about this book of Dyer’s was its associative leaping from idea to idea, I found myself still wanting a little more rind. There are personal, scenic-like details that crop up repeatedly–Dyer’s girlfriend Laura is a wonderful foil, for instance–but these ingredients raise certain expectations that go unfulfilled. For example, Dyer buys a flat in Oxford, England–Dullford, he calls it. And it occurs at a point in the book where this seems like the most reckless action he could take, and yet he doesn’t really go into the why or the how of the purchase. He doesn’t pay it the same kind of narrative attention I was expecting. He thinks about so much in this book, but he doesn’t really allow himself the room to think about this. And it seems less like an interesting narrative maneuver than it does an avoidance of his responsibility as a narrator. In a novel, we would just call this an example of an unreliable narrator, but in a work of nonfiction, does this not just become an author’s mistake?

And while it’s his book, his life, his aesthetic, and while I realize he wants to rid himself of these kind of well-made novelistic restrictions, and while I’m not sure if this fault is either his or mine, I still wanted to hear more about that stupid flat; I wanted to see him besotted by all that paperwork, signing his life away. This is a problem with personal nonfiction of this sort, in that it’s personal only up to a point. It is open but shields the true, fully honest self off from the reader. So, paradoxically, a novel feasibly becomes a more honest way to communicate with a reader because an author isn’t always deploying these invisible firewalls between himself and the reader while maintaining a facade of jocular openness.

Does this reaction make me hopelessly old-fashioned? I feel suddenly like an old man at a concert, complaining about the volume.

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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I’m happy to report that Lady Chatterley’s Brother: Why Nicholson Baker Can’t Write About Sex, and Why Javier Marias Can, an ebook I have written with Scott Esposito, is now officially on the cyber shelves. It’s sort of like an electronic pamphlet, long and argumentative yet sprightly and topical, covering how two contemporary authors treat that most hazardous of subjects: s-e-x. The booklet consists of two long essays, each approximately 35 pages in length. Mine is called “I Know It When I See It: Nicholson Baker’s Sex Trilogy” and Scott’s essay is called “Just Do It: Javier Marias’ Sexless Sexuality.”

Cover of Lady Chatterley's Brother

The ebook is the first installment in the TQC Long Essays series, and happily it’s another iteration of the current crop of longish essays and pieces of nonfiction sprouting up to take advantage of ereaders. I am personally really enjoying how ereaders provide an as-yet-unthought-of market for pieces that are too long for traditional magazine space and too long for a regular website/blog posting and yet too brief for an actual book. It’s like a pamphlet without the staple binding.

As for the topic, it grew out of conversations Scott and I were having about Baker. I’ve written about Baker several times. I kind of have a thing for Baker, but when word came that his newest novel House of Holes was going to be another sex novel, I wanted to run for the hills. Instead, Scott forced me to articulate why I disliked these novels and why I felt they were an aberration on an otherwise wonderfully rewarding and idiosyncratic career. And he coupled all of my criticisms of Baker with his analysis of Marias. The result was, as they say, a learning experience.

Finally, it simply feels rewarding to write this kind of long, impassioned literary criticism. It’s not academic scholarship (obviously), but it’s also not your typical lite journalistic fare–either the too-brief newspaper book reviews, or the reviews that use books to make undercooked socio-political observations rather than actually analyzing the writing on the table. The hope is that essays like these debate books at full volume while also recognizing the personal grain of the actual writer, book reviews birthed within a writer’s sole sensibility. Or to put this much more simply: bookish essays that are fun to read in and of themselves, in addition to the commentary they provide.

For excerpts of these essays, please visit here. It’s available for sale in these formats: ePub, MOBI, Amazon Kindle, and PDF. You can buy it directly from Scott’s website via PayPal, from B&N.com, or from Amazon.

(Now that this project is complete, my personal plan is to buy the book on my Kindle and then enable the text-to-speech feature and listen to my own sentences come back at me with that pauseless, speak-n-spell voice they have rigged up in that little machine–like bedtime reading conducted by the Terminator.)

Notes on Notes on Sontag

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Notes on Sontag
by Phillip Lopate
Princeton University Press, 2009

In many ways this is the perfect book about Susan Sontag, because Phillip Lopate is so much her opposite—warm where she is cold, personal where she is stiff-armed, steely maned where he is bald, self-doubting where she is authoritarian in her judgment, discursive where she is aphoristic. And yet, despite these differences in approach and sensibility, there is a genuine sympathetic vein running throughout this commentary. Lopate didn’t just read Sontag regularly; his professional life kept intertwining with hers. He was an undergraduate at Columbia when she was teaching there, young and married with a teenaged son. And they knew each other in the professional way of postwar intellectual Jewish writers in New York City. (Ah, it makes one want to move to New York!) They were both interested in many of the same foreign, obscure, aggressively arty films and novels, and they both ended up writing fiction and essays, but are mostly known for the latter. In Sontag’s case, she is of course famous for the aphoristically brilliant, perceptive, withering critical gaze at various artists and intellectuals, not so much “personal essays” as essays as personality. Judgment as a style. Lopate is of course the old king of the personal essay, a bard of wandering through the porousness of his own life tying knots of comprehension, then loosening them.

In fact, one of the most interesting parts of this book, for me, is when he discusses her fiction. He says, “Her fiction is, for the most part, unsuccessful. . . . She lacked broad sympathy and a sense of humor, which are usually prerequisites for good fiction. More germane, perhaps, she did not convincingly command a fictive space on the page.” She often thought of her essays as a distraction from fiction writing, which Lopate finds absurd: “I, who revere the art of essay writing, and who can never regard literary nonfiction as even a fraction inferior to fiction, find puzzling Sontag’s need to be thought primarily a novelist.” It is a strange provincialism of the mind, still prevalent today, that nonfiction is below the novel, that greedy fat king of prose, who, like a threatened toddler, takes all the attention and yet still demands more. He says that Sontag was always overvaluing her fiction while kicking the legs from under her magisterial essays, while he himself thinks that the ratio of critical acclaim portioned out to his essays (high) versus his fiction (not nearly as high) is perfectly fitting. (Why that is, why he’s so agreeable on this, is never explored, and is something I would love to know. Just how did he get this levelheaded about the great novelistic beast?)

But aside from this shop talk, there is just the sympathetic explication of her work. Sontag seems more complex and difficult here and yet warmer somehow in her chilly remove. The judgments on her work are complexly layered and precise, and it makes one want ot read more Sontag, while importing Lopate’s heightened example of sympathy.

The looseness of the book is also a pleasure. The book, a tidy, narrow volume issued by Princeton University Press, rambles, juts forward, and then recycles itself. It’s not redundant, but it’s also not a belligerently progressive, teleological argument. It’s a rumination, a chewing through of Sontag’s oeuvre. If it dwindles somewhat in energy toward the end, it’s only appropriate. Sontag’s career does the same, as does Lopate’s enthusiasm for it.

And finally, it’s one of the best things I’ve read by Lopate. Like Sontag, but yet so unlike her, the peculiar glimmer of his aesthetic sensibility is illuminated by his studious concentration on another writer’s work.

David Foster Wallace Symposium Makes Waves

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Hello. I am happy to announce that the latest issue of the Quarterly Conversation has been published and it contains a gigantic symposium/where-are-we-now collection of essays on David Foster Wallace. And I’m happy to be included.

My essay is about Consider the Lobster, Wallace’s second collection of essays. I talk about how Wallace’s nonfiction is, in general, just plain great, but also how his nonfiction fits within the current ecology of literary writing that is not fiction or poetry, i.e., creative nonfiction, literary journalism, literary fiction, the Essay, New Journalism, Lyric Essay, or whatever handy or not-so-handy moniker you prefer. I also talk a bit about everyone’s favorite manifesto from last year, David Shields’s Reality Hunger.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this in the essay but it feels worth being redundant: we seriously need two types of Wallace books to be published. And by Wallace books I mean posthumous collections of his work. First, we need a book of his uncollected nonfiction. There are a couple of late, great pieces: the Federer piece, the graduation speech. (Yes, I realize they published that last one, but I’m talking about publishing it in a version for actual grown-ups, rather than the annoying, cloying, exploitive, one-sentence-per-page edition that’s out now.) But there are also lots of early book reviews that are languishing in forgotten back issues of various journals. I had a phase during graduate school when I would obsessively locate these essays either within the bound back issues or through Interlibrary Loan (ILL!), typically during the times when I should have been collecting scholarship for my academic papers. There is one out there about fiction and the “conspicuously young” that’s a wonderful explication of the difficulties of graduate creative writing programs and how they affect teachers, students, and the publishing industry in general. It actually adds nutritional meat to the whole MFA Good/Bad debate. Anyway, before I go hunting through my files to start quoting from the thing, my main point is: there’s a good-sized book there and an audience who would appreciate it and buy it.

Second, we need a Portable Wallace, a la the Portable Faulkner. I realize that Wallace’s reputation is not foundering; he needs no Malcolm Cowley to call attention to his greatness or to marshall the forces of culture to keep him in print. I say this instead as someone who has taught college. The problem is Wallace is hard to teach–not in terms of explication/analysis (though, I mean, that too), but in terms of just having a usable edition of his work. Because his greatest piece of fiction is Infinite Jest, and because the most conveniently teachable pieces of his short fiction and nonfiction are scattered between various editions, it would be awfully nice to have a 500-paged paperback with a handful of essays and a good chunk of his fiction. That way you could show what Wallace was up to in various genres without having to dedicate an entire semester to it simply because of the books that one would have to buy.

Before I get too full of myself and start rattling off all the other books I think we need published (a collection of Cynthia Ozick’s essays on Henry James? an updated edition of Peter Taylor’s Collected Stories?), let me also mention all the other great DFW-related essays in the issue: my main man Scott Esposito on Infinite Jest; Edie Meidav on A Supposedly Fun Thing; CJ Evans on Brief Interviews; Lance Olsen on Oblivion; John Lingan on The Pale King; and Andrew Altschul on “The Suffering Channel,” among other things. I’m happy to be a part of this symposium, especially since after the initial publicity wave for The Pale King crested and dissolved, Wallace-related criticism seemed to dry up. Also, finally finally, there is still the regular round of reviews and interviews in the issue.

From Updike to Baker to Wallace

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Hello.

I am happy to report that my essay about the cross-pollinations between John Updike, Nicholson Baker, and David Foster Wallace is up at the Quarterly Conversation. It’s part of the newest fall issue, which also includes essays and reviews covering Stefan Zweig, David Shields, that new “alternative history of the novel” by Steven Moore, and, as Nabokov might say, much, much more.

In the essay I argue that Baker is a kind of stylistic midpoint between Updike and Wallace, and that all three writers can be understood as stylistic sequels to one another. Finishing up the essay got me thinking about writer-on-writer influence in general and stylistic overlap in particular. At the same time I was teaching some of Henry James’s stories, and it was while reading “The Jolly Corner”–that long, digressive, thickened, dark night of the self–that I thought of Wallace’s prose, especially the prose in Oblivion, his last story collection. Does Late James have something in common with Late Wallace? There’s a more substantive, quotation-filled post there. But, as Hemingway might say, I’ll fish that swamp tomorrow.